Irina Filatova
Soviet Historiography of Anti-Colonial Struggle[1]
(1920s-1960)
Soviet Africanists produced hundreds of books, the majority of which never reached the reader outside the Soviet Union and are now thoroughly forgotten. There were multiple reasons for this. Soviet Africanists had little first-hand knowledge of African realities; some of their works were purely ideological and some were merely political expedient. All Soviet publications were subject to strict state censorship and in addition (or as a result) authors tended to self-censor themselves. Soviet realities in general were not conducive to debate outside the framework of official doctrine, or to the development of new ideas. The language barrier was, of course, an additional problem, for translations were rare and the choice of books for translation was usually ideologically or politically motivated. However, some topics that Soviet Africanists worked on - or rather the ideas they put forward – were to have a long life, gained a following abroad and became a part of the ideology of many national and social movements in Africa. Anti–colonialism was one such topic. Thus, for example, “strategic tasks”, the timing of each of the two stages of revolution – national-democratic and socialist, the “mobilization of motive forces”, the “education of the masses”, the relationship between the “cadres” and the “masses”, the leading role of a particular class or party at a particular stage of the revolution – were all notions derived from the Soviet theory of anti-colonialism, and they are still passionately discussed in South Africa today. Why did these ideas prove so attractive to those who fought and won anti-colonial struggles - and what did Soviet African studies contribute to them?
The Soviet Theory of Anti–Colonialism
and Soviet African Studies in the 1920s and 1930s
The Soviet theory of anti-colonialism - or rather the part of it pertaining to national liberation movements – was first formulated by Lenin in his Preliminary Draft Thesis on the National and the Colonial Questions for the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920 and in the Report of the Commission on the . It was later developed in his article, “Left-Wing” Communism – an Infantile Disorder, in his speech to the Second All-Union Congress of Communist Organisations and Peoples of the East, and in his speeches and reports to the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Comintern. Later, Stalin significantly modified some of Lenin’s ideas, and the Sixth and Seventh Congresses of the Comintern made further modifications. In the 1950s, when many Asian and first African countries became independent, the changing international situation resulted in the transformation of the theory, and in the early 1960s it acquired the form in which it lasted until the mid-1980s. The transformation of the official theory is important for this topic, for during the Soviet era all academic debates and political battles around problems of anti-colonialism could take place only on the basis of this official theory.
The main points of Lenin’s theory as expressed in the Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions (written on the basis of Lenin’s Draft Thesis) to the Second Comintern Congress were as follows:
1. The world consists of oppressing and oppressed nations (not only classes); the former are a small minority; the latter, a huge majority.
2. After the First World War “relations between nations… are defined by the struggle of a small group of imperialist nations against the Soviet movement and Soviet states with Soviet Russia at the head”.
3. “Any national movement can only be bourgeois-democratic by nature, for the main mass of population of backward countries consists of peasantry…” This point provoked a heated debate in the Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions to which the Theses were presented for discussion. The members of the Commission thought that the term “bourgeois-democratic” did not reflect the difference between reformist and revolutionary movements. “Very often (probably in most cases)”, the Commission stated, “while the bourgeoisie of exploited nations supports national movements, it simultaneously fights against all revolutionary movements and revolutionary classes in agreement with, i.e. together with the imperialism bourgeoisie.” Thus, the term “national-revolutionary movements” was substituted for “bourgeois-democratic movements.” This meant that in principle communists could support “bourgeois liberation movements in colonial countries,” but only when “these movements were truly revolutionary, when their representatives will not prevent us from educating and organizing the peasantry and the broad exploited masses in the spirit of revolution.”
4. In pre-capitalist conditions, in the absence of a proletariat, the experience of peasant councils on the outskirts of Russia should be applied. Peasants would understand such a “form of applying communist tactics”, but “the proletariat of the advanced countries can and should help the backward toiling masses”. First of all this applies to the proletariat of Soviet republics.
5. The capitalist stage of development is not unavoidable for “the backward people who get their freedom now”, for “the victorious proletariat” will wage systematic propaganda among them, and Soviet governments [2] “will render them assistance with all means at their disposal”.
6. Communist parties should work not only in their own countries but in the colonies as well. “The greatest betrayal” of the member parties of the Second International lay exactly in the lack of action in this direction. [3]
All points seem clear here, except, perhaps, the second one: what did Russia’s position on the international arena have to do with the colonial question? In fact, this was the crux of Lenin’s approach: although Russia did not fit into the category of oppressed nations, it was a victim of the same few but powerful oppressing nations. Thus the main idea of the theses: socialist Russia and anti-colonial movements were natural allies - despite the fact that anti–colonial movements were bourgeois by nature - and as such should act together in a united front against imperialism, because a) bourgeois movements in colonies could be national-revolutionary if they allowed communists “to educate” the masses and lead them; and b) under the leadership of communists in the colonies themselves, in the metropoles and, first and foremost, in Soviet Russia itself the most “backward” colonial peoples, i.e. those that had not reached the capitalist stage of development, might avoid going through it.
By the mid-1920s Lenin’s theses had undergone substantial transformation. While Lenin stressed the possibility and even the desirability of an alliance with the colonial bourgeoisie, as long as it did not hamper communist propaganda, the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in 1924 rejected the idea that the national bourgeoisie in colonies could have any anti-colonial potential. Moreover, even socialists who agreed to support colonial reform rather than outright revolution in the colonies, were now called “national reformists”. Soon those who wholeheartedly supported anti-colonial revolutions but not under the banners of the Comintern were denounced as the worst enemies of all – “Trotskyists.”
These changes were, of course, initiated at the very top. The Party’s national policy was now defined by Stalin who had began his ascent to the Party leadership from an article on this very topic. Stalin did distinguish between the bourgeoisie of imperialist countries and the “national bourgeoisie” of colonial and dependent countries - as did Lenin. The latter, Stalin wrote, “could support the revolutionary movement in their countries against imperialism at a certain stage and for a certain time.” [4] However, by the mid-1920s the Soviet leadership rejected the possibility of an alliance with bourgeois parties and movements, even temporary ones, and even in the colonies. Already in his first article on the national question, Marxism and the National Question published in 1913, Stalin declared that “…generally the proletariat does not support the so-called “national-liberation” movements because until now all such movements have acted in the interests of the bourgeoisie and corrupted and confused the class consciousness of the proletariat”. [5] This article was included in the 1946 edition of Stalin’s works – which meant that he did not change his position on this issue until the last years of his life.
In the 1930s Stalin developed his idea of the hegemony of the proletariat in the national-liberation struggle. In his article, The International Nature of the October Revolution, Stalin wrote: “The era of liberation revolutions in colonies and dependent countries has come, the era of the awakening of the proletariat of these countries, the era of its hegemony in revolution.” [6] Lenin’s approach was thus in effect abandoned, although it was never mentioned either by Stalin or by multiple Soviet interpreters of the works of the classics.
* * *
Soviet African studies emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s, [7] during the upsurge of Stalin’s campaign against “national reformism”. The views of the first Soviet Africanists were greatly influenced by a curious combination of Lenin’s theory (“united front”) and Stalin’s fight to stamp out “national-reformism” and to step up the idea of proletarian leadership in national-liberation revolutions.
Several events stimulated Soviet interest in Africa. From 1921 the Communist Party of South Africa actively participated in the work of the Comintern. During the 1920s representatives of different African countries, first of all, South Africa, worked in the various organizations of the Comintern, studied in its schools and participated in its meetings and congresses. In 1928 the Sixth Congress of the Comintern adopted the creation of an “independent Native republic” in the Union of South Africa as the main goal and the main slogan for the CPSA, [8] thus attracting the attention of researchers to the problems of this country and of the whole continent. From the late 1920s one of the Comintern’s schools, the Communist University of Eastern Toilers (KUTV) began to enroll groups of students from Africa; some South Africans studied at the Lenin School – another Comintern educational institution. In 1929 a research wing of KUTV, the Academic Research Association for the Study of National and Colonial Problems (NIANKP) opened a study circle on African socio-economic problems.
There were only a handful of Africanists in the Soviet Union at the time, and even fewer of them specialised in problems of anti–colonialism. Only five people studied these or related subjects: a Hungarian, Endre Sik (in the Soviet Union he was known as Andrej Alexandrovich Shiik), Georgi Yevgenievich Gerngros, Nikolai Mikhailovich Nasonov, Ivan Izosimovich Potekhin and Alexander Zakharovich Zusmanovich. They were all connected to the Comintern and based their work not only on Party documents and Lenin’s and Stalin’s works, but also on Comintern publications, lectures and discussion about the East and, to a lesser extent, about the “Negro problem” in the United States. Speeches and publications on the “national-colonial question” by such Comintern theoreticians as Ludwig Magyar, Georgi Ivanovich Safarov and Otto Kuusinen provided the "academic” context in which a new academic discipline grew and developed. These people were the ones who set the tone, and their publications are testimony to the political atmosphere in which first Soviet Africanists worked.
The style of Ludwig Magyar, deputy head of the Eastern Secretariat of the Comintern’s Executive Committee, was academic, but even for him colonies were a field of political battles, rather than of academic analysis. His articles usually began with conclusions.
This is, for example, the beginning of his article on national reformism: “In the developed capitalist countries social democracy is the main social basis of the bourgeoisie, while in the colonies our main enemy, the main social basis of imperialism – I stress, social - is national reformism.” The article presented a cogent argument in favour of the thesis (which was, as we now know, wrong) that the national bourgeoisie “does wage the struggle, but cannot wage a consistent revolutionary struggle”, and as a result would never achieve national liberation. [9]
Georgi Safarov, another deputy head of the Eastern Secretariat, wrote like a real pogromist: “…it is necessary to arouse the hatred and the fury of the masses against any imperialist violence and against concrete agents of imperialist violence. The struggle should be directed against definite, concrete governing institutions, organs and methods of the imperialist state… It is necessary to be able to concentrate the forces of destruction, hatred and indignation of the masses upon every representative of violent power.” [10] Safarov went even further in his denunciation of the national bourgeoisie than Magyar, when he wrote that it was getting “fascist”. He called for “revolutionary dictatorships” with communist parties at their head to be established in colonies on the basis of the “mobilization of the destructive forces of the revolutionary proletariat.” [11]
The atmosphere of a theoretical, and later of a real physical pogrom was not conducive to the deep study of any problems, but particularly not of the problems of contemporary history. In evaluating the works and behaviour of the founders of Soviet African studies it is impossible to ignore this factor. The question is whether they wrote despite this atmosphere or because of it; and whether they contributed something really new and valuable to their discipline, that went beyond the Comintern’s scholastics, in this case in the study of anti-colonialism.
At the first meeting of the African study circle at NIANKP Endre Sik, who at that time worked for the Comintern, [12] presented a programme for the study of Africa – the first ever in Russia. [13] The study of anti-colonialism occupied a large place in the programme, although Sik’s main topic, as defined by the name of the study circle, was socio-economic problems. Even the very need to study these problems was explained by the fact that the core of Lenin’s approach to the “national-colonial question” was the principle of the right of nations to self-determination, and that the application of this principle to the countries that had not yet formed nations, i.e. had not created their own national bourgeoisie, had not been properly studied. [14]
“Until now the Comintern and its sections [15] have paid very little attention indeed to the question about the most backward colonial countries like Black Africa”, wrote Sik. “We have been too interested in the burning issues of China, India and other colonial countries… But our Marxist-Leninist revolutionary philosophy does not recognise and does not allow any hierarchies in respect of colonised countries… In the near future we have to do everything to fill this gap. We must do this immediately and unconditionally, because in the colonial peoples of Black Africa, who are more exploited and oppressed than any other, we have potential allies in our struggle against the imperialist system, for these most backward and undeveloped peoples, who, as a rule, do not have a more or less developed proletariat, are the most defenceless victims of world imperialism.” [16]
The programme contained sections on the “History of the Opposition of Native Tribes to the Capitalist Occupation” and on “Liberation Movements and Organisations of the Oppressed Peoples of Black Africa.” [17] Sik also mentioned “non-capitalist development” in Africa which, according to him, would be possible because African peoples did not have “native capitalism”. [18] Thus, in Sik’s interpretation the study of social structures of African societies, and first of all, of the existence or a non-existence of local bourgeoisie, was firmly connected with the understanding of the nature and role of African peoples in the struggle against imperialism, which in his view was tantamount to their role in world history. In effect Sik repeated here Lenin’s points with the exception of the bourgeois nature of national movements. In his view there was no bourgeoisie in Africa, and little possibility that it would ever emerge. According to Lenin, if there is no bourgeoisie, there is no nation; and if there is no nation, there is no national movement. Within the framework of class-based Marxist-Leninist theory any social or political movement had to have a class definition; it could not be simply a revolutionary liberation movement. In the case of Africa such movements could not called either “bourgeois” or, even less so, “proletarian”, so Sik simply avoided any definitions.
Sik’s article Black Africa on the Revolutionary Road, published in 1930, became the first Soviet study devoted directly to anti-colonial movement in Africa. However, there is not much anti-colonialism in it. Sik described the colonial exploitation of African peoples and their hard economic situation. Anti-colonialism in his view was a natural and logical outcome of exploitation – logical to such an extent that there was no need to prove the connection. So, he described only one strike and quoted only one, though quite radical, declaration by an African leader – the young Jomo Kenyatta.
It is quite possible that Sik did not know about African religious movements, Afro-Christianity, etc., but he made no mention of African political parties either (with the exception of the East African Union in connection with the strike) – and he must have read or heard about them: Josiah Gumede, the leader of the African National Congress, visited Moscow in 1927. There could be only one reason, i.e. that such parties were considered to be neither revolutionary, nor anti–imperialist, and thus did not merit a mention from the point view of the anti-imperialist struggle.
If, in Sik’s view, some developments in African societies could compromise their image, he explained them away by colonial exploitation or by imperialist provocations. Thus, he wrote that the clashes between Shona and Ndebele were the result of provocation on the part of British imperialism, the purpose of which was “to stifle their rebellious mood.” [19]
During the 1930s Sik worked on his doctoral thesis, The History of Black Africa. [20] If this monumental work had been published when it was written, it would have opened a new era in the development of African studies throughout the world. Sik described the history of the continent in its entirety: all its regions, all its history as it was then known, from the beginning to the 1930s. Moreover, he attempted to present African peoples as the subjects, not the objects of history. For a contemporary reader this attempt may look crude and naïve, and in many instances Sik simply failed, for his simplistic Comintern Marxism was certainly Euro-centric – but in the 1930s nobody else even tried.
Naturally, anti-colonialism occupied an important place in this work. Sik collected an enormous (for the time) amount of material about opposition to colonisation, strikes, anti-colonial religious movements and about the political organisations of dozens of African countries. The manuscript also contained Sik’s ideas on the nature and periodisation of liberation movements. Unfortunately, this work was published only in 1966 (in Hungary, but in French and English), when not only Sik’s ideological approach but also much of his material was completely outdated, and his mistakes only too obvious. It is unlikely that Sik had the time and energy to change much of his original text for publication: at that time he occupied one of the highest positions in the Hungarian government. Yet because of this delay it is difficult to judge Sik’s views and approaches of the 1930s on the basis of this publication.
The first Soviet publications on Africa were authored by Georgi Yevgenievich Gerngross, who published under the pen-name “Yug” (in Russian “South”). In the late 1920s and early 1930s he published four books: Imperialism in the Black Continent; The Union of South Africa: Essays; British Colonies in East Africa; and Imperialism and Colonies. [21]
Despite this impressive list of publications and the work he did at NIANKP (he was not a full-time employee), Gerngross remained unknown. Well educated and a non-Party member, he was an outsider among the Soviet Africanists of the time. His father had been a Tsarist general (a fact that his colleagues might not have been aware of), and his fate was sealed: he was arrested and in 1937 shot.
None of Gerngros’ books was devoted directly to anti-colonialism, but he touched upon this topic, mostly in his book about South Africa, which contained several chapters on this topic. He wrote about the activities of the Industrial and Commercial Union (the first big African trade union) and described the ANC and other African political organisations. He thought, however, that the future belonged “neither to the peaceful slogans of liberal national native organisations and nor to uncoordinated actions of individual trade unions, but to the power of the proletariat that would be able to unite these hapless masses in a mighty gust.” “All these national congresses,” he continued, “leagues of Negro communities, European-Native associations, conferences of non-European clergymen, and other similar organisations that call on the black population to fight by legal means through petitions, parliamentary questions, etc.,… all such organisations in fact assist the white bourgeoisie.” The Communist Party, Gerngross wrote, was the only one which called for “a new method of struggle” – the anti-imperialist revolution, at the basis of which was “the agrarian question.” [22]
The importance of the “agrarian question” (in effect, the land question) was not Gerngros’ own idea. Comintern theoreticians of anti-colonialism often wrote about the coming “agrarian revolutions” in Asia, where, according to them, this form of struggle was the most obvious, for peasants constituted the majority of the population there. [23]
Gerngross paid special attention to the slogan of the independent Native republic. He published the full text of the Resolution of the Sixth Congress of the Comintern on South Africa and quoted the speech at the Congress of the South African communist S.P. Bunting – one of the leaders of CPSA, who turned against the slogan. He also gave his own thoughts about the slogan and the reaction to it among South Africa’s black and white population. [24]
Gerngros’ manner slightly differed from that of his colleagues: his books were academically better, contained more concrete material, less theorising, and none of the labelling, that was typical of the time. But his political line fully coincided with the Comintern’s official line – particularly where anti-colonialism was concerned. It is difficult to know how sincere he was, when he wrote about the appeasing role of non-proletarian organisations in anti–colonial movements, of the need for hegemony of the proletariat and the communist parties in the anti-imperialist revolutions even in colonial countries, and of the independent Native republic as the only correct goal of struggle. Whatever his motives, it did not same his life.
The best known Soviet Africanists of the 1930s who wrote on anti-colonialism were Potekhin and Zusmanovich. In 1932-36 they published numerous articles on Africa (mostly on South Africa), and in 1933, a co-authored monograph, The Labour Movement and Forced Labour in Negro Africa (their third co-author was Albert Nzula, the first black secretary of the CPSA, who at that time was studying at the Lenin School in Moscow and later died there of pneumonia; his alias and pen-name was Tom Jackson). [25]
The structure of this book inaugurated a pattern followed by other Soviet Africanists for years to come: failures of the economy; colonial exploitation and hardships experienced by the African population; anti-colonial movements from “more primitive” forms, such as peasant movements and uprisings, to trade union movements and finally communist movements, where they existed.
The problems of anti-colonialism occupied approximately half of the book. The text was academically uneven. Some parts presented completely new material, while others gave a biased, even distorted picture of reality. Thus, in the chapter “Peasant Movements and Uprisings in Colonies” the authors gave a detailed description of Kimbangists’ clashes with the police, but not of the movement itself – neither its goals, nor its religious nature. Only the economic grievances of the followers were listed, and Simon Kimbangu himself was not even mentioned. Moreover, the assertion by the Belgian authorities that the movement was “extremely conservative and religious by nature” was called “hypocritical”. [26]
The authors did not say that militancy - uprisings, bloody clashes with the police and the army – was the only “correct”, or even the preferable form of anti-colonialism, but other forms simply do not merit a mention. There were, however, two exceptions: early signs of the struggle for land in Kenya and the role of the CPSA in the peasants’ movement in South Africa. The latter was completely removed from reality. “The Communist Party”, asserted the authors, “leads the struggle of peasant committees. It also organises labourers on plantations and on the farms; simultaneously it attracts industrial workers to render assistance to peasants in their struggle.” [27] We do not know the distribution of labour among the authors, but Nzula could not have read this chapter, let alone written it: he would have known better.
On the other hand, two chapters, “The Trade Union Movement in Negro Africa” and “The Economic Struggle of the Working Class in Negro Africa” contain concrete and detailed information on trade union organisations (by industry) in South Africa and in several West African colonies, as well as detailed accounts of strikes. One is left with the impression that this information could only be provided by a participant, or drawn from systematic reading of local newspapers (which was quite possible: KUTV received not only national but several provincial newspapers from South Africa).
Anti-colonial theory, as the authors saw it, was presented in the chapter “The Struggle for Independence and National Reformism”. For the first time in Soviet literature they clearly outlined the concept of a two-stage revolution as applied to the African continent. They wrote: “the struggle for land and the war for national liberation constitute the contents of the first stage of the revolution in Negro Africa.” This stage, according to them, would be bourgeois-democratic, and so would the independent Native republics created as its result. However, already during this stage “the proletariat… will have to introduce significant social initiatives – the nationalisation of mining enterprises, railways, banks, etc.” The second stage, according to the authors, would begin in the Union of South Africa “through gradual transformation of this agrarian-nationalist, bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist revolution; the process of strengthening of socialist elements against the Native bourgeoisie will constitute its economic content…, and the process of the transition of revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of proletariat and peasantry into the dictatorship of the proletariat, its political content.” As for the rest of the African continent, there, the authors write, “anti-imperialist revolution and the support of the countries under proletarian dictatorship will create the possibility of non-capitalist development of peasant economies.” [28]
The authors also offered an analysis of the “driving forces of the revolution” and of the social structure of African societies – equally detailed and equally remote from reality. They disagreed with Sik about the existence of a local bourgeoisie: while, they said, it was correct that there was no industrial bourgeoisie in Africa, there were “local exploiters”, who were represented by “a commercial and money-lending bourgeoisie and tribal chiefs”. According to them, the proletariat was the only group of the population which could really rise against imperialism. The commercial bourgeoisie was a faithful ally of imperialism, while tribal chiefs could have differences with it. The intelligentsia was in principle against imperialism, but was not consistent enough, because it mostly consisted of the children of tribal chiefs. The ANC was called a national-reformist organisation, whose social basis was provided by chiefs and the intelligentsia. But the policy of the Congress was discussed in detail, with quotations from its resolutions and from the articles of its members published in the local media, including Umteteli Wabantu. [29]
Two other examples of “national-reformist” organisations were Ghana’s Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society and Kenya’s Gikuyu Central Association. Unbelievably, the authors thought that the main task of “communists and revolutionary-minded workers” was “to expose the treacherous activities of these organisations systematically and daily.” But their programmes were analysed on the basis of first-hand sources with quotations from documents and such details as, for example, “the possibility of the emergence of revolutionary opposition inside the Gikuyu Central Association.” What this possibility was remained unclear – perhaps the purported return to Kenya of Jomo Kenyatta, who was to finish his course at KUTV in 1933. Whatever it was, such details were certainly impressive for the time. [30]
Zusmanovich and Potekhin continued their crusade against national reformism in their articles published in the mid-1930s. The main topic of these works was the class analysis of the supposed social base of the anti-colonial revolution. Who would constitute a united anti-colonial front? In some cases Zusmanovich wrote that it would be “a united front of the working class, the peasant masses and the urban poor against the imperialist-feudal bloc, against the treacherous Native bourgeoisie,” [31] in others, that this would be “a united front of “Native and white workers.” [32] In his view there could be no alliance with the bourgeoisie, with the exception of the “petty bourgeoisie” which according to Marxist terminology of the day meant peasants. In compliance with the Comintern theory Zusmanovich wrote that “the only class capable of uniting the national revolutionary front of struggle is the Native proletariat supported by the most oppressed masses of the European [33] proletariat.” “The national liberation revolutionary movement in South Africa”, he assumed, “could lead to the formation of the independent Native republic only under the leadership of the working class.” [34]
Zusmanovich thought that there was a national – “Native” – bourgeoisie in South Africa, consisting of “traders, sub-lessees, etc.” According to him it could not lead a national-liberation revolution not just because, like any bourgeoisie, it was an unreliable ally, but also because it was not an industrial bourgeoisie, for only a local industrial bourgeoisie could have interests different from those of the imperialists. Zusmanovich was a firm opponent of Sik’s idea that there was no bourgeoisie in Africa at all. “We must understand absolutely clearly,” he declared, “that to deny the existence of a Native bourgeoisie logically leads to denying the need of the struggle for the hegemony of the proletariat in the anti-imperialist revolution.” [35]
An independent Native republic was, for Zusmanovhich, the cornerstone of his scenario of anti-colonial revolution. This republic would emerge as a result of an “agrarian revolution” and of the “liberation from the imperialist yoke” – thus it would be bourgeois-democratic by nature. The creation of such a republic would not lead to the lowering of living standards of the white proletariat. On the contrary, it would raise living standards of black workers to those of white workers; and the rights of white workers would be protected as the rights of a national minority. However, Zusmanovich wrote, because this bourgeois-democratic republic would not be governed by the proletariat, the proletariat “would not stop at the independent Native republic, and would go further, transforming it into a Soviet socialist republic.” This would be not a national-democratic revolution under the hegemony of the proletariat, but a socialist revolution under its dictatorship. [36]
Potekhin was interested in two questions in connection with the anti-colonial revolution: “the Native bourgeoisie”, like Zusmanovich, and South African political organisations. Both were analysed in his article, National Reformism in the Union of South Africa. Potekhin’s view of the African bourgeoisie in South Africa was less dogmatic than Zusmanovich’s, although in principle they agreed. For Potekhin, South Africa had no “national” industrial bourgeoisie, because there was no national industry (which meant that Potekhin considered all industry in South Africa to be foreign). Before the arrival of the British, he wrote, the only accumulation of capital was “the accumulation of feudal property by tribal chiefs”. Later on the emergence of a “national bourgeoisie” was hampered by the fact that South Africa was “not only a colony, but also a dominion”. He did not explain what he meant by this, but it is clear from the context that his idea was close to what Joe Slovo later called “colonialism of a special type” – a colony and a colonial power in one country. Even so, Potekhin wrote, the process of accumulation of “Native” capital had started, and he showed its sources, its nature, and its political role. His conclusion was that the “native bourgeoisie” was a “class in the making”, but that its role “in the socio-political life of the Native society was much bigger than its economic significance.” [37]
When it came to political organisations, both Zusmanovich and Potekhin used labels rather than academic analysis and their assessments notably hardened since the time of their co-authored book. Without hesitation Zusmanovich now called the African National Congress “a feudal-comprador time-server to imperialism,” [38] and placed his main hopes on the radical opposition to its leadership. [39] Potekhin, too, denied the ANC the status of a “national-reformist” organisation which both authors attributed to it before. “There are representatives of the Native bourgeoisie and intelligentsia in it,” wrote Potekhin, but “tribal chiefs who constitute the social basis of imperialism [in South Africa – I. F.], play the leading role in it.” If the Congress fought for the extension of “tribal lands”, for Potekhin it was the struggle for “greater opportunities of feudal exploitation of the peasantry by the chiefs”; if it campaigned to lower government taxes, according to Potekhin, it was only in order to increase the taxes collected for the chiefs’ coffers. With great regret Potekhin noted that the ANC “still had a significant influence on the toiling Native masses.” [40]
According to Potekhin the real national reformist organisation was the ICU, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union. He analysed its policy, its internal frictions and splits, and the political tendencies within each of its fragments. As in case of the ANC, he did not see anything positive in its activities aimed at improving the situation of its members. The only correct way forward for him was to strike. [41]
On the other hand, both author weight in to support the CPSA leadership. Neither mentions the fact of a deadly internal struggle within the Party caused by the Comintern’s interventions, but both denounce communists who were expelled from it for objecting to the Comintern’s methods of “Bolshevisation” and to the slogan of an independent Native republic. Potekhin called them “Bunting’s counterrevolutionary leadership”, and Zusmanovich, “counterrevolutionary opportunists from Bunting’s camp”. [42]
Both Zusmanovhich and Potekhin saw the African situation in a similar way, through the prism of the Comintern’s policy – as did Sik and Gerngros. There were small differences of interpretation and sometimes bitter arguments over small details, but all the Comintern’s Africanists followed its line. The difference was that for Sik and Gerngros Africa was an object of academic study within the framework of a particular ideological doctrine, while for Zusmanovich and Potekhin it was a field of political battle – yet another region which had to be won for the revolution. Zusmanovich’s works were more theoretical, Potekhin’s more concrete. In their article both, but particularly Potekhin, gave direct instructions to their CPSA colleagues on how to wage propaganda, on what they should or should not do. [43]
Zusmanovich soon paid for his theorising dearly: in the middle of 1935 the Comintern’s line made such a sharp turn that Zusmanovich did not manage to follow it in time. Seventh Congress of the Comintern rejected the policy of the Sixth Congress, having returned, in effect, to Lenin’s formulations. This meant that the “united front” was no longer “proletarian”, but rather “popular”; that national reformists were now allies; that in the South African case the independent Native republic was now a taboo; that most of the “Buntingists” were no longer enemies; and that some even had to be allowed to rejoin the party. In fact the changes were not all that sudden – they started months before the Congress, while the preparations were going on. It seems, however, that Zusmanovich believed so deeply in the independent Native republic and in the “proletarian” interpretation of the united front, that he simply failed to grasp the depth of the changes before it was too late. In an article published in 1935 he still wrote: “Some comrades have wrongly interpreted the united front as a reconciliation with national–reformists, because they saw the tactics of a united front as a rejection of irreconcilable struggle against national reformist compromising.” [44]
At the Congress itself Zusmanovich’s KUTV student, Josie Mpama, represented CPSA. Her speech was prepared for her by Zusmanovich and by another student, also a South African communist, Lazar Bach – a fact she tearfully disclosed to the Comintern’s commission of enquiry, where she was invited to explain why she had distorted the line. Zusmanovich had pushed into her speech several pages of apologetics for the proletarian united front, not a popular one, and at the end had added the cherished goal of the creation of an independent Native republic. Zusmanovich was removed from his position of a Head of the African Section of KUTV. Bach soon paid for his mistakes with his life. The main accusation against him was not connected with South Africa, but this distortion of the line added weight to his sentence. Zusmanovich’s position was offered to Potekhin, but soon both were expelled from KUTV altogether for organising a lecture by a visiting South African journalist, who (it was reported) was a Trotskyist. In fact, he wasn’t, but for both Potekhin and Zusmanovich their expulsion was a blessing in disguise. Had they remained in position longer, they would, most probably, have perished in the camps together with hundreds of their former colleagues and students. [45]
With that the African section at KUTV was closed and Comintern’s African studies effectively ceased. Zusmanovich and Potekhin were to return to their subject only in the new era, after the War.
***
It is difficult to assess Soviet African studies in the 1930s, particularly in relation to the discipline of African studies in Western countries of the day. Unlike their western colleagues Soviet Africanists did not travel to Africa. The Comintern did send secret emissaries to South Africa but they did not publish the results of what they observed - they only wrote reports for the Comintern’s Executive Committee, or, in some cases, directly to Stalin; but those remained, of course, completely secret even within the closed Comintern system. Soviet Africanists had no experience of African realities, and their publications were extremely scholastic. Their views, or at least the views expressed in their publications, were completely subordinate to the ideological dogma and political directives of the Comintern, and because of this even their theoretical constructs were much less interesting than they might have been, had they resulted from independent research and debate, even within the context of the same ideology.
It would be wrong to say that there was no debate at all. During the 1920s and even in the early 1930s there was a lot of debate, but it was strictly limited to interpretations of the official line, and at any moment could get the participants into trouble. To give just one example: a heated theoretical battle was fought by Nasonov and Sik in the pages of the Revolutsionyi Vostok journal. In 1929 Sik, who at that time was studying the problem of race relations, published a critical review of Nasonov’s article about the “Negro problem” in the USA. Nasonov replied with a crushing criticism of Sik’s views in general and of his approach to the race problem in particular. Both sides accused each other of a lack of understanding of Marxism and an inability to apply its principles to the race problem.
Sik knew the empirical material better but Nasonov was a stronger demagogue. After much bickering Nasonov gained a complete victory over his opponent by publishing a crude but devastating review – in effect a political report – of Sik’s book The Race Problem and Marxism. [46] For several years after this Sik was a whipping boy for whoever cared to denounce him, until finally the Revolutsionnyi Vostok published his repentant letter, in which he admitted that all the accusations against him were correct, gave a detailed account of where and how he was wrong and explained that his theory was “objectively directed against the programme and policy of the Comintern” – although how this showed in his text was not clear. Sik finished his letter with a call: “I and those comrades who in this or that way, or in this or that aspect supported my views must consider it to be their Bolshevik duty to admit our political mistakes without any reservations, categorically to dissociate ourselves from them, to overcome them and to be in the forefront of the struggle against distortions of Marxist-Leninist theory and of the Comintern line in these questions.” [47]
After this nobody was willing to discuss the race problem in the US for a long time to come. And this was a great pity: the questions raised during the discussion were interesting: what was the social nature of the American black population – was it a class or a race; what was a race generally; what were the goals of the struggle of American blacks: independence or integration; how did the Comintern’s slogan of an independent black republic for the “black belt” states of the USA fit in this struggle – and so on.
Perhaps, the main problem with Soviet studies of anti-colonialism in the interwar years was that Africanists did not see the analysis of African realities as their main goal. What they wrote was, in effect, practical recommendations for the Comintern and for the communists and other “progressive forces” of the continent. Their works had, quite openly, an applied character. As true Cominternians they believed that they knew the correct and final answer to any question, if not personally, then through the collective wisdom of the Party and the undisputed correctness of its ideology. The task was simply to show why and how this particular answer was correct in order to persuade others.
Thus in effect ideology was the main obstacle to the development of Soviet African studies – but paradoxically it was precisely this ideology which led Soviet Africanists to raise and discuss problems which their Western colleagues began to discuss years later –thank in part to the Soviet influence. This is true first of all about anti-colonialism. In the 1930s Soviet Africanists presented the African trade union movement, strikes, clashes in the rural areas, etc. as a part of a wider anti-colonial movement which they saw as central to Africa’s contemporary history. Their Western colleagues did not discuss these topics – certainly not in this light – until much later. Even in the 1960s, when the first Western works on anti-colonialism had already emerged, an anti-colonial writer like Terence Ranger could note that Soviet historians had begun to study this topic earlier, though, of course, he could not know about publications of the 1930, and based his judgement only on what had been written in the 1950s and early 1960s. [48]
The Comintern’s wisdom was the same for all countries, irrespective of the concrete situation in each of them. Different countries were just “examples”, concrete manifestations of the general laws of historical development. Stalin wrote: “specific features only supplement general features” and insisted that communist parties should base their work on these general laws and not on specific situations. This explains why Soviet Africanists of the 1930s did not pay much attention to the differences between the African countries which they wrote about – they tended to stress only what these countries had in common, which often led to distortions of reality. The only details that interested them were those connected with uprisings, clashes with the police, strikes, and sometimes repression against communists, trade union leaders, etc. Paradoxically, this academically invalid approach resulted in the comparative analysis of events in different countries – a method then used in the West only by social anthropologists.
Soviet Africanists were also the first to analyse the social basis of African political organisations. Of course, this analysis could hardly be valid because they had only three categories, defined by the Comintern, to describe the whole spectre of political, religious and social movements in the colonies: feudal-bourgeois; national reformist; and national revolutionary – besides the communist, of course. Moreover, they used social terms directly transferred from European capitalist societies, which could not reflect the social realities of African colonial societies (proletariat; rural proletariat; peasantry; industrial bourgeoisie; commercial bourgeosie, etc.).
The international connections of the Comintern, its almost unlimited financial possibilities and indeed, the whole nature of its work created unique possibilities for research. In their publications Soviet Africanists refer to primary sources (documents and materials of political parties, government documents, documents of various colonial commissions, etc.) and to local newspapers of varying ideological backgrounds (Rand Daily Mail, Umteteli Wabantu, Umsebenzi, etc.) –as well as the press of the metropoles and the latest specialist literature. In this respect they were sometimes more closely in touch with events than their Western counterparts. Thus Potekhin published his review of a book by the South African trade unionist, William Ballinger, virtually immediately after it appeared in the bookshops. [49]
Moreover, the Comintern’s Africanists worked in close and permanent contact with representatives of African countries studying at KUTV or at the Lenin School or working in Comintern’s various organisations. There were not only communists among them, but also trade unionists and representatives of other political parties. Zusmanovich, Potekhin, Sik and Nasonov taught them, worked together with them in the African circle of NIANKP, and co-authored publications with them. The book by Zusmanovich, Potekhin and Nzula was only one of several examples of such cooperation.
On the one hand such cooperation meant that Soviet Africanists had a permanent access to fresh information not only from written sources but also from participants in events. This meant that some of their publications (notably Gerngross’s and Potekhin’s), particularly those devoted to political organisations and trade unionism, contained solid, detailed and sometimes even unique data.
On the other hand they became, at least in part, participants in events themselves, because, without a doubt, their ideology influenced their African students and colleagues – future leaders of anti-colonial and communist movements on the continent. Many years later John Marks, chairman of the CPSA, said of Potekhin: “I consider Ivan Izosimovich Potekhin my teacher… We were students, and Potekhin was our professor. He gave us lectures on Russian history and on British colonial policy in Southern Africa, and also seminars on current political problems. As I remember Potekhin now, he was then an energetic young academic, a born lecturer and a hard worker, who, while teaching us, never missed an opportunity himself to study”.
Moses Kotane, general secretary of the CPSA, had this to say about Potekhin: “I knew him from 1933… Our professors were Zusmanovich, Sik and others, and then came Potekhin. I have known him well both as a person and as a talented young academic… We had long and very interesting conversations, and every time he showed a deep understanding of the most complicated problems of South Africa. His contribution to research proved very great, because he was one of the first to approach these problems from a Marxist position – at a time when bourgeois academics dominated Africanist research.” [50]
Another channel of their influence were their publications in foreign languages, particularly in the Negro Worker, the journal of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, which was distributed in Africa. Translations of some of their articles were also published in Umsebenzi. [51]
This influence was not undisputedly for the good. The debate on the existence or non-existence of African bourgeoisie, on the nature of the independent Native republic (e.g. on the question of why the proletariat, which is supposed to lead the first stage of the revolution, should give power to somebody else after its victory) and on other theoretical issues, started in Moscow, was transferred to South Africa and, combined with the Comintern’s “bolshevisation” of the CPSA, nearly destroyed the party. Kotane and Marks themselves belonged at that time to different camps within the CPSA and sent messages to Moscow, each calling its wrath down on their respective opponents. [52]
Yet, the fact remains that, leaving ideology aside, in the 1930s Soviet Africanists worked in a way in which their Western colleagues began to work only in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when they moved to African universities, began to publish in African media and to create schools of their students and followers. In the early 1930s Moscow had such a school, which made its own – unrecognised - input into African studies, and perhaps even (through its ideological influence) in political events on the continent. True, the Soviet Africanists of the 1930s used a turgid, ideological language which renders their works almost unreadable today but through communist publications and through the African leaders who worked with them, their approaches and assessments, among other factors, pushed the next generation of Africanists to study new topics, such as the social structure of African societies and anti-colonialism, the social basis of African nationalism and the nature and possibilities of the state in post-colonial Africa. These were to become dominant concerns for all Africanists in the 1960s.
“Winds of Change” in Soviet African Studies:
the late 1940s and 1950s.
Inevitably, the changed post-war world changed the approach of official Soviet ideologists to problems of anti-colonialism. In the first years after the war no official documents on this topic appeared because the institutions that might have generated them were gone. The Comintern had been dissolved in 1943 (although in practice it had already ceased to function in 1937), and no congresses of the CPSU were held until 1952. However, academic publications, particularly those coming from the very top of the Soviet Academy of Sciences hinted at changes in the official approach to this topic.
One could sum up the contents of such publications in two words, “crisis” and “collapse”. Several Soviet monographs and collections of article on colonialism were published in the late 1940s-early 1950s, and all had one of these words in the title. At first it was “crisis”, and by the late 1950s it was usually “collapse” – a fair enough reflection of the accelerating process of decolonisation.
According to Soviet theoreticians, the new feature of anti-colonialism was the fact that “broader and broader masses of people… are drawn into the national liberation struggle”… “even at the most remote corners of the colonial world.” [53] According to academician Yevgenii Mikhailovich Zhukov, head of the Institute of General History and of the Department of History at the Academy of Sciences, Madagascar was such a remote corner, for the only example of this process in his book was the 1947 uprising in that country. Listing the new features of anti-colonialism after the war, Zhukov did not quote any official documents (because there were none), but rather articles by the late Andrei Zhdanov, one of the top Soviet ideologists of the 1940s and by the British communist Palm Dutt. Both stressed the upsurge of the armed struggle, and Dutt also listed the creation of independent republics in Vietnam and Indonesia, “the introduction” of African peoples to the struggle and the strengthening of the role of the working class, trade unions and communist parties in the leadership of liberation movements. [54] The independence of Vietnam and Indonesia apart, there was not much new here. And a long quotation from “Comrade Stalin’s teaching on the stages of the Chinese revolution” allowed Zhukov to leave untouched the interpretation of the two stages of a national liberation revolution. [55]
However, in other respects Zhukov’s work was quite innovative. For the first time the Soviet theory of anti-colonialism had to face the phenomenon of independence as one colony after another changed ots status. This phenomenon had to be interpreted and incorporated into the existing theoretical constructs. It was necessary to define the nature of Soviet relations with the new states. It would seem that the Soviet Union would hail the liberation of colonial countries – after all, this had been the main goal of the Comintern and Soviet policy. But in reality everything turned out to be more complicated. The problem was that few new countries acquired their independence according to the scenario created for them by the Comintern, a scenario still in force after the war. According to this, they could reach independence only under the hegemony of the proletariat, led by local or friendly communist parties – whereas in fact they often achieved it under the leadership of those whom the Comintern denounced as “feudal compradors” - not even national reformists! It was impossible to admit that something was wrong with the theory, so something had to be wrong with the newly liberated countries. Thus Soviet theoreticians greeted their birth without fanfare.
If a colony obtained its independence not under the leadership of the working class then, according to Zhukov, this independence was “formal” or “illusory”. “Colonial status, i.e. first of all the economic enslavement of a country by imperialism”, he wrote, “is fully compatible with its formal equality and even with “independence”. [56] Burma and India were given as examples of this “illusory” independence.
The idea of illusory independence was further developed by one of the main Soviet specialists in the theory of anti-colonialism, V. A. Maslennikov. In 1953 he wrote: “… One of such manoeuvres [by the ruling classes of the colonial countries – I. F.] is granting of a fictitious independence to colonies. Granting this so called “independence”, imperialists recruit to power the most venal groups of landowners and bourgeoisie, and through them suppress the national liberation movement and increase colonial exploitation.” [57] In another work Maslennikov gave his list of such “fictitiously” independent countries: Philippines, Burma, Ceylon, India and Pakistan. He even wrote about the “national liberation movement” in India as something separate from the Congress Party – three years after India had proclaimed its independence under Congress rule. [58]
Palm Dutt also omitted independence from his list of new factors in the post-war anti-colonial movement. Moreover, he did not even mention the independence of India and Burma. Indonesia and Vietnam were mentioned but only because they had achieved their independence in a prolonged and bloody armed struggle. However, not all was well even with these countries. For example, in Indonesia “bourgeois nationalist agents of imperialism deny the common laws of social development and demand the creation of “specific ways and laws” for every country, stemming from its specific features,” wrote Zhukov. He explained with disarming sincerity what was wrong with this: “The exaggeration of specific feature in the development of each country is aimed directly at attempting to separate colonial and dependent countries from the democratic and anti-imperialist forces led by the Soviet Union.” [59]
It was precisely the closeness of former colonies to the Soviet Union, not their independence per se, that defined the Soviet attitude to them in the early post-war years. Indeed, at war’s end the Soviet government even attempted to take over some former Italian colonies, in order “to show, what a socialist colony could be” – until these attempts finally failed in 1947. [60]
As in the 1930s, the armed struggle remained the preferred form of anti–colonialism, because in theory it was bound to bring the liberated countries into the socialist camp. After the war this was asserted even more openly. This is how I. M. Lemin, author of a monograph, The Aggravation of the Crisis of the British Empire after the Second World War, described this process: “The peoples of colonial and dependent countries rise up to fight imperialism, arms in hand, they win their independence, create a popular democratic power and join the mighty camp of socialism, democracy and peace.” [61]
The leading role of the proletariat in the national liberation movement was still considered the main condition for its success. Lemin even wrote about this as if it was a reality, not a wishful theoretical construct: “The working class, whose numbers, discipline, political influence and authority have increased to a huge degree, now leads the national front of struggle”. Indeed, all post-war Soviet theoreticians of anti-colonialism asserted that the role of proletariat in anti-colonial movements had grown, and Lemin thought that this was one of the three new features of national liberation movements at the time, the other two being the broadening of the front of struggle and the creation of national liberation armies. [62]
The “national bourgeoisie” still occupied a significant place in the post-war works on anti-colonialism, and it was still thought that social divisions within it were bound to define its attitude to national liberation. Lemin, for example, wrote that: “While the struggle unfolds, the national bourgeoisie gets split. The big bourgeoisie, closely connected with foreign banks and monopolies, which is ready to compromise, betrays national interests and forms a bloc with imperialism. The other part of the bourgeoisie, the petty and middle, which suffers from the domination of foreign colonialists, participates in the united national anti-imperialist front.” [63]
Despite the resolutions of the Seventh Comintern Congress and the experience of the united front during the war, immediately after the war the attacks on Social Democrats were renewed. “Right wing socialists – the most vicious enemies of the people”, wrote Maslennikov, “are active accomplices of imperialist monopolies..., suppressors of the oppressed peoples.” [64]
Some aspects of this theory remained in use until Gorbachev’s perestroika changed the priorities of Soviet foreign policy. Others, however, had to be changed or withdrawn much sooner. Zhukov’s thesis that former colonies could not be really independent if they were not closely connected with the Soviet Union, was soon replaced with a list of particular reforms. A country could be considered really independent if it began a land reform, nationalised the banks and fought for peace together with the Soviet Union and its allies. The most important of these reforms was nationalisation. In the 1950s-early 1960s this reform alone could earn a former colony the approval of Soviet theoreticians. [65] And, despite all the differences between the really independent and “fictitiously” independent countries, they were all finally recognized, together with the working class of developed countries, as “a part of a united front against the common enemy.” “In the course of successful liberation struggles colonies stop being the most important reserve and source of power of imperialism and turn into the most important reserve and component of the great camp of peace, democracy and socialism, led by the Soviet Union”, wrote Lemin. [66]
Armed struggle was another aspect which soon had to change its nature – though it did not lose its allure to many Soviet writers on anti-colonialism until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1949 a meeting of the Information Bureau of Communist Parties (Cominform) – a modest successor of the Comintern – took place in Hungary. It introduced a new notion of peace as a factor uniting foreign supporters of the USSR (“peace front”; “struggle for peace”; “supporters of peace”, etc.) “For the first time in the history of humanity”, a Cominform document ran, “there emerged an organised peace front, led by the Soviet Union – the stronghold and standard-bearer of world peace. The courageous call of communist parties, declaring that peoples will never fight against the first socialist countries in the world, against the Soviet Union, is spreading wider and wider among the popular masses of capitalist countries.” [67]
Of course, this concerned first of all the peace movement in the capitalist world, which became, according to the authors, another factor of the crisis of capitalism – on condition that it was directed by the USSR. But as a result the thesis of armed struggle as the preferred method of anti-colonial movement had to be used with caution, particularly after October 1952, when the CPSU 19th congress for the first time declared the possibility of peaceful co-existence with capitalist countries. The thesis could not be cancelled but offensive struggle was now transformed into defensive struggle. Thus, having said that the creation of national liberation armies was a new feature of anti-colonialism after the war, Maslennikov immediately explained that “the creation of these armies came as a response to the attempts by imperialists to suppress national liberation movements.” [68]
Another new feature of Soviet political doctrine after the war was anti–Americanism. As far as anti-colonialism was concerned, the USA was, on the one hand, accused of “expansionism with the purpose of capturing British and French colonies”, and on the other, of “leading the reactionary imperialist front against national liberation movement.” [69]
In the late 1940s and early 1950s Potekhin (who had returned to the African studies) also wrote several theoretical articles. After the war he became deputy director of the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was not a professional interpreter of the official line, which may be why his theoretical writing was even less sophisticated than theirs. He stressed the role of the proletariat in the anti–colonial movement (quoting Stalin), described “open armed struggle” as the sign of the crisis of the colonial system (quoting Zhdanov) and accused “the big bourgeoisie of the most developed colonies” of “direct betrayal of the national interests of their countries” (proving it by another quote from Stalin). Of course, he thought that the independence of several Asian colonies “did not resolve the main tasks… of the national liberation movement.” As an example of the “correct” national liberation movement in which “under the working class leadership the struggle for national independence merges with the struggle for all-round economic and political renovation of the country”, Potekhin quoted the 1948 programme of the Indian Communist Party which, among other things, demanded the nationalisation of banks and big industries.” [70] Having merged the two stages of the national liberation revolution into one, Potekhin in effect repeated what Stalin originally said about national liberation movements: there was no reason for the proletariat (i.e. communist parties) to support them, unless they could be turned into socialist movements.
In his article, V. I. Lenin on the National Liberation movement in Colonial and Dependent Countries, Potekhin again wrote not so much about Lenin’s approaches to the topic, but rather those of Stalin and of Soviet post-war ideologists. He quoted some (but not all) of Lenin’s points on anti-colonialism from his Theses on the National-Colonial Question and his work Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism and simply continued with Stalin’s ideas from The Foundations of Leninism, as if all these works were one organically connected whole. One of the omitted points was the bourgeois-democratic nature of the national liberation movement. The point emphasized the most, however, was the possibility that the newly-liberated countries might by-pass the capitalist stage of development and choose a “non-capitalist way of development”. There was no doubting that “non-capitalist” for Potekhin meant “socialist” in the Soviet sense: at the end of the article he even offered a term for “the new state form of the dictatorship of proletariat” in former colonies - “people’s democracies,” as in the new socialist countries of Eastern Europe. However, most attention in his work was paid to denouncing American aid to “underdeveloped countries” – much more than even to denouncing metropoles themselves. [71]
Perhaps the most important of Potekhin’s theoretical works on anti-colonialism at the time was his paper for Stalin’s 70th anniversary presented at the special meeting of the Academic Council of the Institute of Ethnography. Much of its contents and style was a reflection of the time: one could see how the stifling atmosphere of the late 1930s was back. Potekhin wrote that the “strictly scientific” Soviet theory of anti-colonialism was created by the “leading light of science”, Stalin, while Lenin only “outlined its main features”. According to him, its main point was that “the solution of the colonial question, the liberation of the oppressed peoples from colonial slavery, was impossible without proletarian revolution and the overthrow of imperialism.” He even reproached those intellectuals from colonial countries who refused to support this idea and proved their mistakes by quoting Stalin. However, immediately after this he pointed out that the national bourgeoisie could at some stage support colonial revolutionary movements, and even mentioned a “special strategic stage of the colonial revolution – the stage of the national anti-imperialist front.” [72]
It is easy to accuse Potekhin of a lack of consistency and even of academic dishonesty. Unlike the pre-war scholastic but logical theory, Soviet post-war theoretical constructs were generally full of contradictions, juggling and distortions of the original texts, even the texts of the “classics of Marxism”. Before the war the striving to get to the bottom of every theoretical problem continued until 1937, despite the unfolding terror. In the 1940s and 1950s this momentum was completely lost, and Soviet theoreticians seemed to care more about choosing correct quotations for their publications and omitting incorrect ones. Sadly, in the Humanities a prominent academic who had reached a certain position could not escape being a theoretician: “theoretical” articles were a requirement of the status.
However, theoretical logic and consistency were not only hampered by the political climate. Soviet leaders now needed concrete information about the newly liberated countries, for they had to establish relations and do business with them – and concrete facts did not fit into such schemes easily. Potekhin’s article on Stalin’s theory may be the best proof of this, because the second part of it is based on concrete material. It was still full of generalisations: Potekhin spoke about “African society”, and not “societies”; about indirect rule in British colonies in general – though with concrete examples; the same about “African chiefs”. Moreover, just as in the 1930s, all groups in African societies had to be presented to Soviet readers in the categories understandable to them. Chiefs, for example, had to be “feudal or semi-feudal”, “peasants” were “petty bourgeois”, workers were the “proletariat” – and the only specific feature of this proletariat was that “it was young and had not accumulated experience of political struggle”.
Sometimes Potekhin still wrote about events not as they were, but as they ought to be. One example was his assertion that after the war the influence of the “feudal-aristocratic elite” in Africa was collapsing. The proof given was the events of the late 1940s in Buganda. However, Potekhin was honest – or tried to be: neither in this article, nor in his later works did he write anything that directly contradicted the facts. Thus, having quoted Stalin on the hegemony of the proletariat in the national-liberation movement, he still wrote: “at present the leading role in the national-liberation movement of the majority of colonies of Tropical and South Africa belongs to the national bourgeoisie and national intelligentsia.” [73] In an article published in 1956, when the situation in Buganda changed, he recognised, though reluctantly, that his understanding of the situation of chiefs in African societies had been wrong. [74]
Perhaps one of the most difficult of Potekhin’s tasks at that time was to ascribe political characteristics to African leaders: he could not fail to understand that not only Soviet leaders and diplomats but he too would soon have to face these leaders in person.
Potekhin wrote about many of them, for example, of Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah with qualified sympathy. They were revolutionaries, and in Potekhin’s system of values this was the highest status that a human being could aspire to. However, their revolution was only national, not a social one, and not all of them were ready for radical measures, particularly armed struggle. Azikiwe, for example, had declared his adherence to non-violence, and Potekhin denounced him as a “petty bourgeois national reformist”. Other African leaders were also rebuked for their “desire to keep the movement within the framework of colonial legality”. For Potekhin, the smashing of European shops during a demonstration in Ghana was the highest point of the anti-colonial movement in that country. [75] Whatever his generalisations, even these theoretical works leave no doubt that Potekhin learnt a lot more about African societies than he knew about them in his Comintern years.
In the early 1950s the contemporary problems of the African continent were studied not only in the Institute of Ethnography under Potekhin, but also in the Institute of Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1952 and 1953 the Institute published two big works connected with anti-colonialism in Africa. Both were disappointing.
The book by Irina Pavlovna Yastrebova became – and for many years remained - the most detailed Soviet study of the Union of South Africa. Although it was called The Union of South Africa after the Second World War, in effect Yastrebova described the economic and political history of the country from the early 20th century on. [76] The book was extremely rich in detail: it seems that the author left out nothing - no meaningful fact or event. But it is not easy to read: it is full of propaganda-style clichés and stock phrases, and all its details do not lead to a valid analysis, and as a result the scale and the real meaning of events are distorted. Thus, Yastrebova called the National Party “fascist”, but the word “apartheid” did not enter the text. The policy of Smuts’s government was subjected to even harsher criticism than that of the NP - the author did not distinguish between the two at all. Another example: following the priorities of Soviet foreign policy of the time Yastrebova paid much attention to South Africa’s peace movement. Such a movement, led by communists, did indeed exist in South Africa but in the early 1950s it was extremely marginal both to the country’s politics and even to those communists who were still free. Yastrebova wrote about it as if she was unaware of the reality – although the banning of the CPSA was, of course, well covered in the book: “Peaceful democratic forces in South Africa understand that the struggle for peace is the duty of all progressively-minded citizens, who must join the struggle by protesting decisively against all acts of preparation for the new war by the imperialist camp, particularly by the American imperialism.”
Yasterbova’s approach to anti-colonialism and her view of the social basis of national liberation movements and of particular parties did not differ from that of Potekhin. But Potekhin’s text was livelier and more interesting than Yastrebova’s. One reason could be that Potekhin used many more first-hand sources: Yestrebova refered only to the British communist paper, The Daily Worker, and The Guardian which was run by South African communists. There were no references to South African sources and only two or three references to non-communist periodicals and publications. This was not the fault of the author: it was extremely difficult to get such publications in the Soviet Union at the time, and quoting “reactionary” “bourgeois” sources was extremely dangerous. Either because of his position or for some other reason Potekhin could afford to write differently.
The collection of articles, The Imperialist Struggle for Africa and the Liberation Movement of Peoples dealt directly with anti-colonialism. Both Lemin and Yasrebova contributed chapters to it, both simply repeating the main points of their previous publications, tailoring them even more strictly to suit Soviet orthodoxy. [77]
The biggest achievement of Soviet African studies in the early 1950s was a huge volume The Peoples of Africa, published in 1954 by Potekhin and Dmitrii Alexeievich Olderogge, head of the Leningrad school of Africanists who mostly studied African languages and ethnography. [78] This enormous (730 large format pages) book was written by a handful of authors with most articles authored by the two editors themselves. In volume, if not in contents, it could only be compared with M. Hailey’s An African Survey. [79] Ethnographic data occupied more space in it than political history, but each regional part ended with chapters on anti-colonialism, written mostly by Potekhin These chapters presented detailed information about political parties, labour and religious movements, strikes and uprisings and dealt with the whole spectrum of anti-colonial movement from the colonial occupations to the mid-1950s. In effect this was the first history of African anti-colonialism, not only in the Soviet Union but anywhere.
There was no theorising in these chapters. Theory was dealt with in the introduction and then left more or less alone – which, of course, makes the concrete material presented in it much more valuable and interesting. One reason for this was that by then Potekhin had accumulated a vast knowledge of his subject, which allowed him to select and present his material expertly. The other was doubtless the simple fact that Stalin died in March 1953, and the volume went to the printers only in September 1954 by which time the ideological climate already softened considerably.
Potekhin’s other great achievement of the time was his second doctoral thesis devoted to the process of ethnic consolidation in South Africa. [80] Whether one agreed with the author’s conclusions or not, this work was a major contribution to the debate on the South African nation, in which Potekhin himself actively participated. [81] In this work Potekhin presented anti-colonialism as a major factor in the process of the consolidation of the national consciousness of South Africa’s Bantu-speaking communities.
This work, like The Peoples of Africa, is fully based on concrete material. Thus, despite his desire, in the spirit of Soviet Marxism, to raise every problem of the continent to the level of high theory, it was actually Potekhin who inaugurated a new “empirical” in the Soviet treatement of anti-colonialism.
The late 1950s saw a transformation of Soviet interpretations of anti-colonialism. It was in these years that a new Soviet strategy in Asia and Africa was forged, the main principles of which remained practically unchanged until the early 1990s. The major change lay in the realisation of the huge value to the USSR of the political independence of the newly liberated countries and the recognition of the importance of maintaining an alliance with them in the situation of the cold war. By the late 1950s it had become obvious that the Soviet Union and these countries – irrespective of their ideologies and policy - had some common geo-political interests. The success (from this point of view) of the Bandung Confernce and of the Cairo Solidarity Conference of Asian and African countries, [82] and the support that Soviet initiatives often received from these countries in the United Nations – confirmed the collective value of this new strategic alliance for the Soviet Union and created a new political environment within which the USSR could act with great effect.
The change was hardly less dramatic than that brought by the Seventh Comintern Congress. The 1957 meeting of representatives of Communist and working class parties – another attempt to revive Comintern’s practice of working out a common strategy for the world communist movement - paid little attention either to anti-colonialism or to the newly-liberated countries. The next such meeting, however, though convened only three years later, declared that the importance of the collapse of the “system of colonial slavery under the pressure of the national liberation movement” was “second only to the formation of the world socialist system”. The meeting stated that “Communists always recognised the progressive, revolutionary significance of wars for national liberation”, but simultaneously they stressed that in the new global situation different forms of struggle were possible, both military and political “depending on condition in each country.” Moreover, the working class was no longer accorded a leading role in the national liberation movements - only an active one.
Of course, bringing former colonies into the socialist camp remained the ultimate goal. The ideal scenario for them was the creation of a state of “national democracy” led by “the united national democratic front of all patriotic forces of the nation.” According to this plan the role of the proletariat in such a state would gradually grow, the national bourgeoisie would align itself with “internal reaction and imperialism”, the assistance of socialist countries and communist parties of the world would play “the decisive role” in strengthening national independence, and the “popular masses” would gradually realise that “non-capitalist development” was “the best way to improve their condition”. The difference was that even where this could not be achieved, anti-colonialism was now recognised as a progressive development. [83]
Potekhin’s writing on anti-colonialism in the late 1950s and early 1960s reflected the pace of change. His articles on this subject published in 1958 and 1959 were still full of clichés from the previous era. All Africa’s problems for Potekhin still stemmed from colonialism and the United States; everything about anti-colonialism and almost everything about the new African states was good, and whatever the metropoles offered was a plot to extend their control of Africa. [84] As before, he still denounced African politicians who thought that it was possible to reach independence through the ballot box: he was still convinced that the overthrow of a colonial regime was impossible “within the framework of colonial legality”. [85] However, in 1960 Potekhin’s approach underwent a dramatic change. In his long article, The Characteristic Features of the Collapse of the Colonial System in Africa he wrote – for the first time in his long academic career – that the national liberation movement was “universal” and “popular” by nature and that in new conditions it was possible “to gain independence by peaceful, constitutional means”. Of course, he immediately added that “to deny the oppressed peoples their right to initiate and use violence” would mean to give colonialists the right to do whatever they pleased, and the fact that they themselves denounced violence meant precisely that using it was the right thing to do.
Not even the documents of the 1960 Summit of the world’s Communist parties could make Potekhin lose his belief in the potential of the African proletariat which he termed as a “powerful force” in the anti-colonial movement. Yet simultaneously he had to admit that it “has not yet become the political leader of the broad popular masses”. Amazingly, the most revolutionary class in African societies was now… the intelligentsia. Not only was it leading parties and non-governmental organisations, but its “best representatives” were also spreading Marxism on the continent. It looks as if Potekhin himself did not believe what he had written, for he immediately corrected himself: as before, “the intelligentsia was mostly connected with feudal and bourgeois circles” – a context in which its progressive role looks even odder.
Of course, Potekhin mentioned that anti-colonial revolutions could not be considered complete until all survivals of the colonial legacy in all spheres of life were removed – a process, in which the world socialist system was “always ready to render all-sided and selfless assistance”. The problem – and this was a complete novelty – was that not only the imperialists were to blame for Africa’s woes. Among those who opposed reform Potekhin mentioned not just African feudalists and capitalists, but also the “sabotage” by several new governments. African allies were not criticised in the Soviet Union until the mid-1980s, but Potekhin did it in 1960 when their record was tainted with just one bloodless coup. In some countries, he wrote, “even those norms of bourgeois democracy that had been won by the hard struggle of the toiling masses during the colonial period, have now been eliminated.” [86]
It is next to impossible to judge the views of Soviet historians and political scientists who published works on such politically sensitive issues as anti-colonialism during the Soviet era. One can never know for certain what the authors truly believed, what they found it necessary to say and what was added by the editors? Such questions became particularly relevant not only in connection with another article on the collapse of the colonial system in Africa, this time written by Apollon Borisovich Davidson. Even in the article for a highly censored political magazine, Mezhdunarodnaia Zhizn, Davidson managed to keep his individual style: interesting quotations, a broad selection of concrete material and brilliant erudition. Yet the meaning of the article and the author’s approach to the topic were similar to those of Potekhin – even of pre-1960 Potekhin. [87]
Fortunately this was not the only publication of Davidson’s at the time. His book, The Ndebele and Shona in the Struggle against British Colonisation, was published two years earlier, but it was this book that opened a new page in Soviet writing on anti-colonialism. There were no theoretical generalisations in it – just one (appropriate) quotation from Lenin in the introduction. Instead there was a thorough analysis of concrete events, based on the extensive use of primary sources (including British Blue Books, memoirs, materials drawn from British and Russian media) and practically the whole of the available literature. There was nothing in this book that could make the Soviet censors unhappy, yet it was a different history of anti-colonialism: concrete events and people in all their complexity, no empty generalisations – the starting point of this book was research, not theory. [88]
Even now, almost forty years later, this book reads well, just as a good history should. It is difficult to believe that it was written only six years after Yastrebova’s book: they belong to different eras. Potekhin knew it: the same year as Davidson’s book was published he wrote to Lionel Forman: “Yasrebova’s book is old, you’ll find nothing worth attention in it…” [89]
Several other works which touched on the subject of anti-colonialism were published in the late 1950s by the new generation of Soviet Africanists. The most significant was the big article by Roza Nurgaliievna Ismagilova, The Peoples of Kenya under Colonial Rule, in which a whole chapter was devoted to the history of anti-colonialism in that country, from the first political parties to the Mau Mau uprising. This work was based on a broad range of sources, well researched and well written. Ismagilova did not quote the details of Mau Mau rituals, but concentrated instead on British reprisals because, according to her, she did not trust the reports of bourgeois media on this subject. This was, however, the only lack of balance in her otherwise academically solid work. [90]
***
Until the late 1950s the Soviet theory hampered the study of anti-colonialism as it was, and not as theoreticians wanted it to be. Despite this in the 1930s it was this ideology that introduced new academic approaches to Africa, and brought about the study (albeit mostly theoretical) of new topics. But by the 1950s the innovative potential of this ideology was exhausted. Concrete knowledge of African anti*-colonialism accumulated much faster in the West, than in the USSR, and although the Soviet Africanists of the 1950s knew more about Africa than their predecessors in the 1930s, the limitations of ideology and censorship prevented them from developing a deeper understanding of African societies at a time when it was particularly important. Moreover, in the 1950s the theoretical dogma, changed to accommodate the changing realities, lost its internal logic – though not its scholastic nature. For many decades it caused some Africanists to distort conclusions based on research, to apply crude schemes to an obstinately resistant reality, or just led them to be satisfied with a simple repetition of its main points, slightly seasoned with additional facts. But in the 1950s another way emerged: the complete separation between theory and research. Five pages of theory (“bowing to the icons” as the joke ran) and then one was free to write what one wanted - within well known limits, of course.
The crude labelling style of the 1930s underwent a major revamp. In the 1950s and early 1960s even official documents were written in a flowery style, with many epithets and metaphors, some of them set in stone (thus, communist sympathy for the fighters for independence was always “ardent”; their support – always “active”; the plans of imperialists were always “crazy”; the Chinese people was always “great” (until 1959, of course). There was also a lot of “love” – mostly the love of colonial peoples for the Soviet Union. There was something in that era that required romantic images.
African realities were romanticised too. K. Ivanov (this was the pen name of Vladimir Semionovich Semionov, later a deputy foreign minister) wrote for example: “Next to the peasant towers the distinctive figure of the African worker, sometimes half-peasant, some-times half-intellectual… Those who do not see this figure, extremely poor, but cheerful, optimistic, full of faith in the future and often drawing his confidence from the example of the great Soviet Union and other socialist countries – see almost nothing in Africa”. [91] It was exactly the desire to see more in African anti-colonialism than this mythical figure, which led the new generation of Soviet Africanists of the late 1950s to drop theoretical generalisation and refer to primary sources instead.
Today, after six decades of African independence and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the problems of anti-colonialism of the 1930s-1950s look different. Direct comparisons between these processes would be inaccurate but looking back at the studies of anti-colonialism of those days could help our understanding of what happened to the USSR and beyond its borders. But one should sound a cautionary note too. Then Soviet Africanists thought that they knew everything about anti-colonialism. Now, when we assess their works, it seems to us that we know all the answers – but we may be just as wrong.
While it is easy to be scornful of the Soviet Africanists of the 1930s-1950s, the fact is that they left the most noticeable trace in world African studies. They found a real gap in Western writing on Africa at their time and, indirectly, spawned a whole further generation of Marxist writing on Africa, this time by Western scholars. One wonders, how much of Russian Africanist writing of today will have such a long life.
[1] This article has been published in: P.T. Zeleza, ed. The Study of Africa. Vol. II: Global and Transnational Engagements. Dakar: CODESRIA, 2007, pp. 203-234. I could not upload the scanned version.
[2] Before the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1924, several independent states with Soviets at their head emerged on the territory of the former Russian Empire, as well as in Hungary, Bavaria, etc.
[3] V. I. Lenin. Doklad komissii po natsionalnomu i kolonialnomu voprosam, 26 iiulia (Report of the Commission on the National and the Colonial Questions, 26 July). In: V. I. Lenin. Sobraniie sochinenii (Collected Works), 4th edition, Moscow, 1950, vol. 31, pp. 215-220.
[4] I. V. Stalin. Sochineniia ( Works), vol. 10, p. 11.
[5] I. V. Stalin. Sochineniia (Works), vol. 1, p. 49.
[6] I. V. Stalin. Sochineniia (Works), vol. 10, p. 245.
[7] Russian periodicals (mostly Comintern-affiliated) published several articles by South African communists even before then. See: A.B. Davidson. Yuzhnaia Afrika: stanovleniie sil protesta.1870-1924 (South Africa: birth of protest. 1870–1924). Moscow, Nauka Publishers, 1972, p. 588.
[8] Member parties of the Comintern were not independent organisations, they were considered to be national branches of this international organisation. This justified the practice of the Centre making all policy decisions for member parties.
[9] L. Magyar. O natsional-reformizme (On National Reformism). Revolutsionnyj Vostok, 1933, no. 6 (21), p. 24, 28.
[10] G. Safarov. Imperialisticheskoie gosudarstvo i natsionalno-kolonialnaia revolutsiia (Imperialist State and the National-Colonial Revolution). Revolutsionnyj Vostok, 1934, no. 3 (25), p. 18-19.
[11] G. Safarov. Op. cit, p. 28-9.
[12] For the detailed analysis of E. Sik’s works see: A. B. Davidson. Endre Sik. Narody Azii i Afriki, 1981, no. 2, p. 148-160.
[13] A. Sik. K postanovke marksistskogo izucheniia sotsialno-ekonomicheskikh problem Chernoi Afriki (On the Foundations of Marxist Study of Socio-Economic Problems of Black Africa). Revolutsionnyi Vostok, 1930, no. 8, pp. 85-100.
[14] E. Sik. K postanovke…, p. 88.
[15] I.e. foreign communist parties.
[16] E. Sik. K postanovke…, p. 88-89.
[17] E. Sik. K poatanovke..., 99.
[18] E. Sik. K postanovke…, p. 96-97.
[19] E. Sik. Chernaia Afrika na revolutsionnom puti (Black Afirca on the Revolutionary Road). Revolutsionnyi Vostok, 1930, no. 8, p. 244.
[20] E. Sik, The History of Black Africa, vols. 1-2. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1966. The second edition of these two volumes supplemented by another two was published in 1971-1974.
[21] Yug (G.Ye. Gerngros), Imperialism na chernom kontinente (Imperialism on the Black Continent). Moscow, 1929; Yuzhno-Afrikanskii Soiuz: Ocherki (The Union of South Africa: Essays). Moscow-Leningrad, 1931; Britanskiie kolonii v Vostochnoj Afrike (British Colonies in East Africa). Moscow-Leningrad, 1931; Imperialism i kolonii (Imperialism and Colonies). Moscow, 1932.
[22] Yug. Yuzhno-Afrikansky Soiuz…, p. 158-9.
[23] See, for example, P. Mif. Problemy gegemonii proletariata v kolonialnoi revolutsii (Problems of the Hegemony of the Proletariat in the Colonial Revolution). In: Sbornik 3-4, Kolonialnyie problemy. (Collected Essays 3-4. Colonial Problems), Institute of World Economy and World Politics, Moscow, 1935, p. 7.
[24] Yug. Yuzhno-Afrikanskii Soiuz…, p. 160-161.
[25] For a detailed analysis of Potekhin’s works see A. B. Davidson. I. I. Potekhin I sovetskaia afrikanistika. (I. I. Potekhin and Soviet African Studies). Sovetskaia etnografiia, 1974, no. 4, p. 73-87.
[26] A. Zusmanovich, I. Potekhin, T. Jackson. Prinuditelny trud i profdvizheniie v negritianskoi Afrike (Forced Labour and Trade Union Movement in Negro Africa). Moscow, 1933. English translation (abridged and not very accurate): A. T. Nzula, I. I. Potekhin, A. Z. Zusmanovich. Forced Labour in Colonial Africa. London, 1979.
[27] A. Zusmanovich, I. Potekhin, T. Jackson. Op. cit., p. 101.
[28] A. Zusmanovich, I. Potekhin, T. Jackson. Op. cit., pp. 165-166.
[29] A. Zusmanovich, I. Potekhin, T. Jackson. Op cit., pp. 166, 170-174.
[30] A. Zusmanovich, I. Potekhin, T. Jackson. Op. cit., pp. 174-179.
[31] A. Zusmanovich. O nekotorykh voprosakh kommunisticheskogo dvizheniia v Yuzhnoi Afrike (On Some Problems of the Communist Movement in South Africa). Revolutsionnyj Vostok, 1935, no. 2 (30), p. 149.
[32] A. Zusmanovich. Antiimperialisticheskoie dvizheniie i borba za iedinyi front v Yuzhnoi Afrike (The Anti Imperialist Movement and the Struggle for a United Front in South Africa). In: Materialy po natsionalno-kolonialnym problemam, Moscow, NIANKP, 1935, no. 6 (30), p. 41.
[33] In this case “European” meant local white.
[34] A. Zusmanovich. Antiimperialisticheskoie dvizheniie…, pp. 42-43.
[35] A. Zusmanovich. Antiimperialisticheskoie…, pp. 38-39,
[36] A. Zusmanovich. Antiimperialisticheskoie..., pp. 43-44, 46-48.
[37] J. Izotla (I. Potekhin). Natsional-reformizm v YuAS (National Reformism in the Union of South Africa). Revoliutsionny Vostok, 1934, no. 4 (26), pp. 84-88.
[38] A. Zusmanovich. O nekotorykh…, p.152.
[39] A. Zusmanovich. Antiimperialisticheskoie…, p. 36.
[40] J. Izotla (I. Potekhin). Natsional-reformism…, p. 83-92.
[41] Izotla (I. Potekhin). Natsional-reformism…., p.102.
[42] J. Izotla (I. Potekhin). Natisonal-reformism…, p. 91; A. Zusmanovich. O nekotorykh..., p. 158.
[43] See, for example, J. Izotla (I. Potekhin). “Umsebenzi” – tsentralnyi organ Kommunisticheskoi partii Yuzhnoi Afriki, 1933-1934 (“Umsebenzi” – the Central Organ of the Communist Party of South Africa). Revolutsionnyi Vostok, 1934, no. 5 (27).
[44] A. Zusmanovich. Antiimperialisticheskoie…, pp. 42-43.
[45] A. Davidson, I. Filatova, V. Gorodnov, S. Johns, eds. South Africa and the Communist International: a documentary history. 1919-1939. London, 2003, vol. 1, p. 18.
[46] N. Nasonov. Negritianskaia problema v Severo-Amerikanskikh Soiedinennykh Shtatakh (Negro Problem in the North American United States). Revolutsionnyi Vostok, 1929, no. 6, pp. 59-76; A. Sik. K voprosu o negritianskoi probleme v SASSH (On the Question of Negro Problem in the NAUS). Revolutsionnyi Vostok, 1929, no. 7, pp. 138-167; N. Nasonov. Rasovaia problema i marksizm v ponimanii tov. Shiika (Race Problem and Marxism as Understood by Com. Sik). Revolutsionnyi Vostok, 1930, no. 9/10, pp. 323-331; A. Sik. Zamechaniia na kritiku tov. Nasonova (Notes on Com. Nasonov’s criticism). Revolutsionnyi Vostok, 1930, no. 9/10, pp. 331-334.
[47] A. Sik. Pismo v redaktsiiu “Rev. Vostoka (Letter to the Editorial Board of the Rev. Vostok). Revolutsionnyi Vostok, 1933, no. 1 (17), pp. 210-219; Quotations – pp. 217-218.
[48] T. O. Ranger. Connections Between 'Primary Resistance' Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa. Journal of African History, 1968, Vol. IX, pp. 438-439.
[49] J. Izotla (I. I. Potekhin). Agentura britanskogo imperializma v riadakh natsionalnogo dvizheniia v Yuzhnoi Afrike (Agents of British Imperialism in the Ranks of the National Movement in South Africa). Revolutsionnyi Vostok, 1935, no. 1 (29).
[50] These reminiscences of Marks and Kotane were recorded by Dr. Leo Rytov in Moscow in 1972 and published in “The African Communist”, the journal of the SACP, in 1973, no. 54, in connection with Potekhin’s 70th anniversaty.
[51] See, for example: I. Potekchin (I. Potekhin) The Unemployed Movement in South Africa. The Negro Worker, 1932, nos. 11-12; J. Izotla, (I. Potekhin). On the Question of the Native Co-operative Societies in South Africa. The Negro Worker, 1935, vol. 5, no.1; J Izotla (I. I. Potekhin). Does a Class of Native Bourgeoisie Exist in South Africa? The Negro Worker, 1935, vol. 5, no. 5; J. Izotla, 1935-3 (I. I. Potekhin). Once Again about the Native Bourgeoisie in South Africa. Umsebenzi, 1935, 13 July.
[52]See A. Davidson, I. Filatova, V. Gorodnov, S. Johns. South Africa and the Communist International…, Introduction and relevant documents.
[53] Ye. M. Zhukov. Obostreniie krizisa kolonialnoi sistemy posle vtoroi mirovoi voiny (Aggravation of the Crisis of the Colonial System after the Second World War). In: Ye. M. Zhukov, ed. Krizis kolonialnoi sistemy (The Crisis of the Colonial System). Leningrad, 1949, p. 4.
[54] Ye. M. Zhukov. Obostreniie.., pp. 5, 6.
[55] Ye. M. Zhukov. Obostreniie.., p. 14.
[56] Ye. M. Zhukov. Obostreniie.., p. 21.
[57] V.A. Maslennikov. Natsionalno-osvoboditelnoie dvizheniie v kolonialnykh i polukolonialnykh stranakh (The National Liberation Movement in Colonial and Semi-colonial Countries). In: V. A.Maslennikov, ed. Uglubleniie krizisa kolonialnoi sistemy imperializma posle vtoroi mirovoi voiny (The deepening of the Crisis of the Colonial system of Imperialism after the Second World War). Moscow, 1953, p. 3.
[58] V. A. Maslennikov. Uglubleniie krizisa kolonialnoi sistemy imperializma (The deepening of the Crisis of the Colonial system of Imperialism). Moscow, 1952, pp. 44, 45.
[59] Ye. M. Zhukov. Obostreniie..., p. 18.
[60] A.B. Davidson, S. V. Mazov, eds. Rossiia i Afrika: dokumenty i materialy, XVIII v.-1960 (Russia and Africa.: Documents and Materials, 18th century-1960). Moscow, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 135-149.
[61] I. M. Lemin. Obostreniie krizisa Britanskoi imperii posle vtoroi mirovoi voiny (The Aggravation of the Crisis of the British Empire after the Second World War). Moscow, 1951, p. 9.
[62] I. M. Lemin. Obostreniie.., pp. 9. 46.
[63] I. M. Lemin. Obostreniie., p. 10.
[64] V. A. Maslennikov. Uglubleniie krizisa…, p. 44.
[65] V. A. Maslennikov, Uglubleniie krizisa…, p. 32, 34, etc.
[66] I. M. Lemin. Obostreniie krizisa…, p. 10
[67] Soveshchaniie Informatsionnogo biuro kommunisticheskikh partii v Vengrii vo vtoroj polovine noiabria 1949 g. (Meeting of the Information Bureau of Communist Parties held in Hungary in the second half of November, 1949). Moscow, 1949, p. 13.
[68] V. A. Maslennikov. Uglubleniie krizisa…, p. 46.
[69] V. A. Maslennikov. Natsionalno-osvoboditelnoie dvizheniie…, p. 38.
[70] I. I. Potekhin. Obosreniie krizisa kolonialnoi sistemy imperialisma i zadachi sovetskoi etnografii: avtoreferat doklada (Aggravation of the Crisis of the Colonial System of Imperialism and the Tasks of Soviet Ethnography. Thesis of the paper). N.p., n.d., pp. 5-7.
[71] I. I. Potekhin. V. I. Lenin o natsionalno-osvoboditelnom dvizhenii v kolonilnykh i zavisimykh stranakh (V. I. Lenin on the National Liberation Movement in Colonial and Dependent Countries). Sovetskaia etnographiia., 1950, no. 2, pp. 27-28; 32-35.
[72] I. I. Potekhin. Stalinskaia teoriia kolonialnoi revolutsii i natsionalno–osvoboditelnoie dvizheniie v Tropicheskoi i Yuzhnoi Afrike (Stalin’s Theory of the Colonial Revolution and the National Liberation Movement in Tropical and South Africa). Sovetskaia etnografiia, 1950, no. 1, pp. 24-27
[73] I. I. Potekhin. Stalinskaia teoriia.., pp. 26-28; 30-31; 34.
[74] I. I. Potekhin. Politicheskoie polozheniie v stranakh Afriki (The Political Situation in African Countries). Sovetskoie vostokovedeniie, 1956, no. 1.
[75] I. I. Potekhin. Stalinskaia teoriia.., pp. 32-34.
[76] I. P. Yastrebova. Yuzhno-Afrikanskii Soiuz posle vtoroj mirovoi voiny (The Union of South Africa after the Second World War). Moscow, 1952, p. 203.
[77] V. Ya Vasiliieva, I. M. Lemin, V. A. Maslennikov, eds. Imperialisticheskaia borba za Afriku I osvoboditelnoie dvizheniie narodov (The Imperialist Struggle for Africa and Peoples’ Liberation Movement). Moscow. 1953.
[78] I. I. Potekhin, D. A. Olderogge, eds. Narody Afriki (The Peoples of Africa). Moscow, 1954.
[79] M. Hailey. An African Survey. London, 1st ed. 1938; 2nd ed. 1957.
[80] A part of it was published in a series of occasional publications by the Institute of Ethnography: I. I. Potekhin. Fromirovaniie natsionalnoi obshchnosti yuzhnoafrikanskikh bantu (The Formation of the National Community of the South African Bantu). Moscow, 1955.
[81] See, for example, S. Forman, A. Odendaal, eds. Lionel Froman. A Trumpet from the Housetops. Selected writings. London, Cape Town, Athens (Ohio), 1992.
[82] The USSR participated as an Asian country.
[83] Dokumenty soveshchaniia predstavitelei kommunistichskikh i rabochikh partii (Documents of the Meeting of Representatives of Communist and Workers’ Parties). Moscow, 1960.
[84] I. I. Potekhin. Raspad kolonialnoi sistemy v Afrike (The Collapse of the Colonial System in Africa). Kommunist, 1958, no. 17.
[85] I. I. Potekhin. Afrika obryvaiet tsepi kolonializma (Africa Breaks the Chains of Colonialism). Mezhdunarodnaia zhizn, 1959, no. 2.
[86] I. I. Potekhin. Kharakternyie cherty raspada kolonialnoi sistemy imperializma v Afrike (Characteristic Features of the Collapse of the Colonial System in Africa). Problemy vostokovedeniia, 1960, no. 1, pp. 16-21; 27-28.
[87] A. B. Davidson. Krusheniie kolonialnoi sistemy v Afrike (The Collapse of the Colonial System in Africa). Mezhdunaronaia zhizn, 1960, no. 11.
[88] A. B. Davidson. Matabele I Mashona v borbe protiv angliiskoi kolonizatsii, 1888-1897 (The Ndebele and Shona in the Struggle against British Colonisation, 1888-1897). Moscow, 1958.
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